dicto for care staff
A speech display for rounds, meals, visits, and the front desk: staff speak, residents with hearing loss read.
The problem on the floor
When a resident cannot hear, the room gets louder. Staff repeat themselves, then raise their voices, and the resident nods along without having caught the middle of the sentence. Neighbors hear private business. Medication information, a question about pain, a conversation about the day: all of it starts to depend on how loudly someone can talk. It is tiring for staff and undignified for the resident.
How dicto works
dicto is a speech display for iPhone and iPad. The person speaking holds the device, or sets it on the table, and talks at an ordinary level. Their words appear on screen as they say them, in large, clear text, in high-contrast colors the reader chooses. The resident reads along and answers in their own voice. There is nothing to set up beyond choosing a language and a color scheme, and the screen has two buttons: one to speak, one to type.
Nothing is recorded, stored, or transmitted. dicto has no server, no account, and no cloud, so when the app closes the conversation is gone. For one voice in a busy room, Solo uses voice-isolation technology to help dicto focus on an enrolled voice, hands-free.
A shift with dicto
On the morning round, the iPad sits on the bedside table. The nurse explains the day's medication at a conversational volume and the resident reads it. At lunch, an aide asks what someone would like and the question is on the screen before it has to be repeated. During a visit, a daughter who has been shouting across the table for a year sets her phone down between them and talks. At the front desk, a visitor with hearing loss reads the receptionist's directions instead of guessing at them.
What dicto does not do
dicto is for spoken conversation with people who have acquired or age-related hearing loss and read fluently. It is not a replacement for sign language or for an interpreter. Speech recognition comes from Apple's engine and is not perfect: accents, background noise, and people talking over each other can be misheard, and dicto shows one speaker at a time rather than a group.
Privacy for the home
Because no data leaves the device and nothing is stored, there is no vendor data flow for a privacy review to assess, no processor agreement to sign, and no record to secure or delete. The institutions page answers the procurement questionnaire point by point, including GDPR and HIPAA.
Buying for a home
A facility manager can decide alone. dicto is $0.99 per device, once, at your country's App Store price, with no subscription and no contract. Homes buy in volume through Apple Business and deploy silently through MDM, or install from the App Store on each device. The step-by-step is on the institutions page.
What others have said
- Independent aging-technology analyst Laurie Orlov included dicto in "Five 2026 new technologies useful for older adults".
- dicto is listed in national assistive-technology catalogs in Spain (Ceapat), Flanders (VAPH), Germany (REHADAT), and France (Handicat). The full list is on the press page.
Questions staff ask
Does it need Wi-Fi? No. Typing works fully offline, and dictation runs on the device for every dicto language except Hindi and Taiwanese Mandarin.
Does the resident need to do anything? Read. The person speaking holds the device.
Which languages? The interface is in 14 languages and speech recognition covers more than 50, so a resident and a carer who speak different first languages can each have their own.
For families: talking with a parent who is losing their hearing